The US company has owned the technology to produce EcoPrime for many years but is only now moving into the commercial stage. It was as far back as 1998 that the FDA sent a non-objection letter to the original developers Union Carbide for the use of the recycled HDPE resin in food applications such as milk, water, and juice.
Commercial plans
Over 10 years later Envision has started commercial production of the resin at its Reidsville, North Carolina plant.
“It has only been recently that demand from consumer products companies has really started to increase,” said Tamsin Ettefagh, VP of sales at Envision.
Having achieved full production scale, Envision intends to produce 18 million pounds of EcoPrime this year at Reidsville. And plans are afoot to add another 18 million pounds of production capacity at its Chino, California plant in late 2011.
Envision claims that EcoPrime is the only FDA-approved recycled HDPE available in the US for use of food and drink packaging.
Recycling HDPE for use in the food industry is complicated because the resin absorbs more volatiles than other popular plastics like PET and it is processed at a lower temperature.
Recycled HDPE in the UK
Only in the UK has another process for recycling HDPE to food grade been commercially developed, with support from the government agency WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme). The process was approved by the FDA with a non-objection letter in 2007.
With the milk bottle market in the UK dominated by HDPE, the development and commercialisation of recycled HDPE has been made a priority. The dairy industry has already reached a target of using 10 per cent recycled HDPE in plastic milk bottles last year and under the Milk Roadmap it is now working to increase that to 30 per cent by 2015 and 50 per cent by 2020.